Growing up, you may have been given reasons for not smoking marijuana. What you may not have heard is that marijuana, like other pollen-bearing plants, is an allergen which can cause allergic responses.

Misdiagnosis of febrile illnesses as malaria is a continuing problem in Africa. A new study shows that in Ghana, dengue fever is circulating in urban areas and going undiagnosed. The authors of the study hope to use the findings ...

A modified, conventional measles vaccine has the potential to act against the Chikungunya virus. This is the result of a study at the University Clinic for Clinical Pharmacology of the MedUni Wien (Medical ...

When diagnosing a case of Ebola, time is of the essence. However, existing diagnostic tests take at least a day or two to yield results, preventing health care workers from quickly determining whether a patient needs immediate ...

New research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggests that Fusobacterium necrophorum more often causes severe sore throats in young adults than streptococcus—the cause of the much better known ...

It is not known what triggered the transmission of Ebola virus from its natural host to humans and the rapid human-to-human spread of the deadly virus throughout Western Africa last year. However, analysis ...

Leah Katzelnick was all set for a career as an anthropologist until she contracted dengue fever. She was in hospital for a week with severe symptoms. It changed her life. She is now working on a new perspective ...

One in five cases of Lassa fever – a disease that kills around 5,000 people a year in West Africa – could be due to human-to-human transmission, with a large proportion of these cases caused by 'super-spreaders', ...

Scaling up to take on large urban areas is the latest challenge for the Eliminate Dengue program, which tackles the disease by seeding infected areas with mosquitoes infected by a particular bacterium. ...

Fever

Fever (also known as pyrexia) is a common medical sign characterized by an elevation of temperature above the normal range of 36.5–37.5 °C (98–100 °F) due to an increase in the body temperature regulatory set-point. This increase in set-point triggers increased muscle tone and shivering.

As a person's temperature increases, there is, in general, a feeling of cold despite an increasing body temperature. Once the new temperature is reached, there is a feeling of warmth. A fever can be caused by many different conditions ranging from benign to potentially serious. There are arguments for and against the usefulness of fever, and the issue is controversial. With the exception of very high temperatures, treatment to reduce fever is often not necessary; however, antipyretic medications can be effective at lowering the temperature, which may improve the affected person's comfort.

Fever differs from uncontrolled hyperthermia, in that hyperthermia is an increase in body temperature over the body's thermoregulatory set-point, due to excessive heat production and/or insufficient thermoregulation.